2000-09-09

Here are the candidates by region. Those shown in
green are self-nominated and endorsed by
a number of members exceeding the 2% cutoff for each region. It's not
easy from the ICANN site to figure out which candidates were placed on
the ballot by ICANN's nominating committee (they are 18) and which by
member endorsements (9).

One rather controversial wrinkle excluded two candidates in the
European region who had nonetheless gotten more than the required
number of member endorsements. ICANN decided that no more than seven
candidates would be fielded in any one region. According to Ted
Byfield, there was at the time "a medium-size to-do" over this
decision. (I was unable to find any mention of the seven-candidate
cutoff on the ICANN site now.) Because ICANN's Nominating Committee
named five candidates for Europe, only two slots were available for
member-endorsed candidates. The two excluded candidates are Lutz
Donnerhacke, with 912 endorsements, and Dmitri Bourkov
with 570. (The 2% cutoff for EU was 471.) In all other regions, all
candidates who exceeded the cutoff for endorsements made it onto the
ballot.

The standout candidate for member endorsements was Andy
Mueller-Maguhn with 2886. Mueller-Maguhn is a prominent member
of Germany's Chaos Computer Club.

2000-09-06

1:08:44 PM

ICANN elections and endorsements.
Voting for five ICANN directors selected by the at-large membership
begins on 2000-10-01. This coming Friday, 2000-09-08, is the
deadline for members to endorse one of the
"self-nominated"
candidates. The endorsement process has been as controversial as
everything else ICANN has ever done.

Background: ICANN estalished a nominating committee, which put
forward 18 candidates
for the at-large board seats. They also established a process
whereby other candidates could get on the ballot. The
self-nominating candidates need to collect the endorsements of 2% of
the registered members in their geographical region, with at least
one from each country in the region.

This 2% requirement clearly makes it more difficult for a candidate not
likely to see eye-to-eye with ICANN's current board members to get on
the ballot. In fact it looks as if three such candidates will go up
against the ICANN-nominated 18.

While registration was open, 158,593 users managed to get through to
ICANN's overloaded and deliberately throttled servers to initiate
the process of registering. Since this process includes a manual
step by snail-mail and then action by the user, its completion takes
some little time. To date 73,023 members have been certified in good
standing.

This ongoing certification introduced a wildcard in the process of
endorsing at-large candidates, to wit: 2% of what number? On August
25 the number of registered users in the North America region stood
at 9,827. Sept. 1: 10,009. Today, Sept. 6: 10,346. So the required
number of valid endorsements each candidate must garner has gone
from 196 to 200 to 206 in that time. The final number won't be known
until the endorsement period ends on Friday.

As it turns out, this membership creep is likely to be moot for the
actual endorsement process. Three candidates have garnered 250 or
more endorsements and the next-place finisher has but 71. Here are
the self-nominated candidates likely to make the cut, along with
their endorsement totals:

Even these totals are somewhat suspect. I finally endorsed a
candidate two hours ago and the total shown for that candidate has
not changed. How long does it take to update a database?

12:17:44 PM

RSA releases encryption algorithm into the public domain.
Two weeks before its epoch-making patent #4,405,829 is due to
expire, RSA Security has released it into the public domain. Cypherpunks
everywhere had been planning patent parties for midnight on September 20;
I expect these will go off as planned.

Carnivore review is DOA.
Five major universities have turned down the FBI's offer to review the
Carnivore system, claims Will Rodger in this
USA Today story.
The FBI's deadline for bidding on the review is today at 5:00 PM Eastern time.
MIT, Purdue, Dartmouth, the University of Michigan, and the UCSD
Supercomputing Center have all signaled their unwillingness to
participate. The issue is the FBI's conditions and restrictions on
the review. MIT security expert Jeffrey Schiller said:

This is not a request for an independent report. They want a
rubber stamp.

2000-08-24

3:03:49 PM

Some people listen to music while coding.
Download descramble.mp3
(6 MB) (mirror).
You'll be so glad you did. It's a rendition of one function from
the module DVDdescramble.c, sung in a mock-70s folksy style in a
rather cracked voice. The author and artist, Joe Wecker, comments: "Anyone
who knows C should be able to figure it out." The chorus consists of riffs on:

I hate the DMCA
It makes this song illegal

Thanks to TBTF Irregular Strata Rose Chalup for the best laugh of the day.

Note added 2000-08-25; updated 2000-09-06:
Wecker's guide for rendering the C code into plain English was
this version
by CMU professor Dave Touretzky, who testified as a witness in
the recently concluded
first
phase of the DeCSS trial.
The source code
for the css_descramble function in this song is 26 lines, 532 characters.
My transcription of the
6-1/2-minute song runs to 164 lines and nearly 3600 characters.
The sung function represents about 2% of the source code of
DeCSS as distributed. At this rate, singing the whole package
would occupy nearly half a CD-ROM and take 5 hours to perform.
(Maybe less because you wouldn't need to sing all the code comments.)

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